April 2021
Rethinking Education (3)
When I was a child, I could hardly wait until I was able to go to school. I loved school from Kindergarten to Graduate School. My children, however, did not love school as much as I did. They were enthusiastic only when they had a really dedicated teacher. My daughter had two of them, both men. The first was in fifth grade and he had a passion for Van Gogh and Shakespeare. She caught that enthusiasm. Later, she had a teacher who was a Holocaust survivor who taught the history of World Wa more...
Rethinking Education (2)
The pandemic closing of schools has given us an opportunity to rethink what we want of our nation?s education. At our country?s beginning, education followed the elite British system of passing on the secular gifts of Roman and Greek knowledge, plus emphasis on the Hebrew and Greek biblical moral teachings. An added feature of this sort of education was political theory and thinking arising from the Greek and Roman experiments with republics.
This system rested on college-educated more...
This system rested on college-educated more...
Rethinking Education (1)
Human beings are the only species that deliberately passes knowledge and remembrance of events to its young. Even the most primitive of our ancestors, once they developed language, used ritual and stories to bring the young into the collective memory of the group. Once writing was invented, history and learning became systematized. History was the first human educational discipline.
In some early civilizations, numbers and counting developed earlier than written words. Trading, wh more...
In some early civilizations, numbers and counting developed earlier than written words. Trading, wh more...
Dumbing Down History Pajaronian
Human beings are the only species capable of contemplating and preserving memories of past events. All human cultures revere some form of history, initially by story-telling, and later through sculpture and visual arts, along with writing. Of course, when it is by memory only, as in pre-literate societies, each generation tends to edit the memory. People get a word wrong, an idea flipped, and lose an entire history when a society suffers plague or invasion.
The best record of pas more...
The best record of pas more...
Dumbing Down of America
It is obvious that America has been "dumbed down." When one quarter of us do not have the smarts to believe the reliable information sources trusted by the other three-quarters of us, we are in trouble. Are they too dumb to wonder why the Conspiracy Networks (Fox and QAnon) told them that former President Trump would be inaugurated on March 4, followed by executions of all the "traitors" who did not support him?
All election officials and all law courts (including the more...